Securities trading systems have been used to interact with multiple sources of liquidity. However as illustrated by the following examples, these systems exhibit significant drawbacks. FIG. 1 depicts at 100 a current type of order management system (OMS) environment. More specifically, it depicts an OMS environment, in which an OMS 110 interacts with multiple trading venues or liquidity source computer systems 120. The OMS 110 may interact with any or all of the liquidity source computer systems 120 in order to ensure execution of a securities order. However, the OMS 110 is restricted to placing an order at one liquidity source computer system 120 at a time, which limits the effectiveness of the OMS 110 in ensuring order execution.
FIG. 2 provides at 200 another example of an OMS 210, which is a limited single-choice system. In this example, after the OMS 210 has sent a securities order via the Financial Information eXchange (FIX) protocol to a destination liquidity source computer system (e.g., an execution management system (EMS) 220), the order is committed to the EMS 220. After analysis on the EMS 220, if a trader decides it is best to work instead with another liquidity source computer system (e.g., a direct market access (DMA)), the trader must cancel the securities order at the OMS 210 and then the securities order must be sent to the other liquidity source computer system. While a particular liquidity source computer system works the securities order, the other liquidity source computer systems 230 with which the OMS is able to interact are not made aware of the securities order. Alternately, even if the other systems 230 are aware of a particular securities order, they are prohibited from working the securities order while it is being worked by another liquidity source computer system.
As yet another example, FIG. 3 depicts at 400 an example data center at a buy-side securities trading operation. The example data center 400 includes an OMS 410 that is responsible for generating securities orders for the securities trading operation. OMS 410 is in communication with a back-end database 420 that stores securities order information for the securities trading operation. In addition, the data center 400 includes one or more liquidity source computer systems 430, which are co-located in the data center 400 to ensure speed and reliability. In operation, the liquidity source computer systems 430 have direct access to the back-end database 420. While some trading platforms/liquidity providers have developed interfaces into various OMS, they are all proprietary to the individual trading platforms/liquidity provider systems. Each generally follows the same type of interface: periodically check the OMS database directly for new/modified/deleted orders (known as “blotter scraping”) and provide custom SQL procedures for trading.
Co-location of the liquidity source computer systems 430 in a trading operation's data center 400, and allowing the systems direct access to the back-end database 420 have been tolerated by trading operations because these steps ensure that the liquidity source computer systems 430 have the fastest possible access to securities order information that is generated by the OMS 410. However, permitting direct access to the back-end database 420 by the liquidity source computer systems 430 results in an overall operation that is not easily scalable, as each additional liquidity source computer system that is added to the data center 400 increases the load on the back-end database 420. In addition, permitting such direct access to the back-end database 420 makes it either impossible or far more difficult for the securities trading operation to limit access to data in the back-end database 420. For example, if the securities trading operation wished to limit a particular liquidity source computer system to accessing only international securities orders, the securities trading operation would have to take additional measures within the back-end database 420 to secure information that did not relate to international securities orders.